Spurs linked to random Luxembourg striker because reasons

Is there a realm beyond Bat Country? A place where transfer rumors not only fly think and fast but become self-aware and fire nuclear weaponry at major cities? We might have found it with this particular rumor. This is nothing less than the pure distilled essence of a dumb transfer story.

There’s a story floating through social media today that says that Tottenham Hotspur are linked with Luxembourger (Luxembourgish?) striker Maurice Deville.

The source of the Twitter posts appears to be football blog Soccerisma, which quotes “sources close to the player” and suggests that Spurs have agreed personal terms to sign him.

A random, black-box continental striker signing? From Luxembourg?! This sounds like a good thing! It is not.

Deville is 24 years old and currently plays (more on that later) with 2.Bundesliga side Kaiserslautern. This might not be a deal breaker if he actually put up good numbers. Thanks to Michael Caley, we got a good look at them. He’s scored a total of ten goals in the past two seasons for Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern II, and Saarbrücken II. These are not good numbers. These are, in fact, unequivocally terrible numbers. Even if you turn your head, squint, and pretend that he kind of looks a little like Mario Götze, this is not the profile of a player that would be a success at a Premier League club of any caliber.

But wait! We’re not done! Luxembourger newspaper Le Quotidien (which is an awesome name for a Luxembourger newspaper, I know) posted today on Deville, referencing what is apparently a story in tomorrow’s print edition of Germain daily Kicker. That story says, essentially, that Deville, having only made two senior starts last season, isn’t good enough for Kaiserslautern, either. So they’re cutting him.

This isn’t just #batcountry. This is Zubat country.

We did a deep dive to see if we could find the origination of this rumor. Best as we can tell, it originated with Soccerisma, or at least, with the “sources close to [Deville].” Did they get bad information? Did they just make things up? Were there illicit drugs involved? We don’t know.

What we do know is that there’s very little actual chance that Paul Mitchell’s black box spit this guy’s name out unless it had been previously infected with a virus, had a fifth of vodka poured over it, and been run over by a car. This is the most ridiculous transfer rumor of all time, and I want to marry it in Las Vegas.